Modi’s U.P. wave and after

His mandate comes with the twin challenges of sky-high expectations and a communally groomed polity

The following statistical nuggets should help to
capture the superhuman size of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory in
Uttar Pradesh.

In the 1984 Lok Sabha election, the Rajiv
Gandhi-led Congress won 83 of 85 seats from U.P. for a phenomenal vote
share of 51%. However, in the subsequent Assembly election to U.P., the
Congress’s share of seats and votes dropped to 269 of 425 and 39.25%,
respectively.
In the 1991 Lok Sabha election, the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), then riding the Ram temple wave, won 51 seats from U.P.,
polling 32.82%. The party continued its winning streak in the Lok Sabha,
getting 52 seats for 33.44% in 1996 and 57 seats for 36.49% in 1998.
The BJP’s victory run ended eight years later in 1999 when its share of
seats and votes dropped to 29 and 27.64%, respectively.

A mismatch

Yet it was a different picture in the
Assembly elections. In the 1991 Assembly election, the BJP won 221 seats
for a vote share of 31.45%. But this was a one-off performance. The BJP
lost all five Assembly elections held between 1993 and 2012.
Importantly, it lost the elections of 1993 and 1996 at a time when it
held a majority of seats from the State in the Lok Sabha. The 1993 loss
was particularly noteworthy because that election was held in the
backdrop of the December 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, which was
thought to have placed the Hindutva-inspired BJP in an unassailable
position. Logic dictated that the BJP should have benefited from the
post-Babri Masjid Hindu consolidation. However, the party was stopped in
its tracks in the Assembly by the emergence of the identity-based
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) as powerful regional
players.

What these figures establish is that in U.P, as perhaps elsewhere,
there is often a mismatch between the Lok Sabha and Assembly election
performances of parties primarily because the Assembly field gets
queered — both by factors locally unique and relevant and by the
stronger presence of regional actors.
Rajiv Gandhi who was
unstoppable in 1984 was forced to confront the Lok Dal, which had its
own sphere of influence, in the 1985 Assembly election. The Lok Dal
picked up 84 seats then. In fact, most psephologists treat a gap of five
percentage points between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections as a
given for any party on the presumption of a preponderance of local
factors in the latter.

The Modi imprint

This
long-held trend stands smashed with Mr. Modi’s staggering haul of 312
seats for a vote share of 39.7% in the 2017 Assembly election. How did
this happen? The SP and the BSP, whose turn it was to stand up and
fight, collapsed in the face of the Modi machine. A host of
imponderables, among them local preferences, absence of a Chief
Ministerial face, rebel contestants, not to mention the 100-odd dalbadlus
(party hoppers) fielded by the BJP overlooking the claims of alienated
veterans, all vaporised under the force and energy that Mr. Modi brought
into the campaign. There was Mr. Modi and nothing beyond Mr. Modi. The
Prime Minister made every calculation, every estimate, the wildest
predictions irrelevant in a story where he played all the parts. On the
campaign, the Congress vice-president, Rahul Gandhi, would joke that Mr.
Modi was all about himself: in the film he produced he was hero,
director, writer, photographer all rolled into one. Ironically, this
came true but with a twist. The film Mr. Modi produced was so completely
about himself that his own party became an extra in it while all Mr.
Gandhi could manage was a place in the audience.

A day after a verdict that is in itself a testament to Mr. Modi’s
phenomenal popularity, any recollection of the popular mood might appear
redundant. But the recapitulation is necessary if only to underscore
the extraordinary nature of the Prime Minister’s relationship with U.P.
voters. On a tour of the State, I met with people whose faith in Mr.
Modi was so absolute that they parroted his every line with conviction,
refusing to even consider the possibility that there might be
exaggerations in his claims — whether made in the course of his ‘Mann ki
Baat’ radio broadcasts, during speeches delivered abroad and in India,
or more recently while on the stump, almost all of it beamed live and
therefore made that much more impactful. Mr. Modi’s address to the
nation on demonetisation, watched and heard by millions of people,
turned out to be history-altering. Mr. Modi’s casting of notebandi as a class war resonated so strongly with the poor that they became his captive vote bank overriding caste lines.

Voices on the ground

At a grocery shop in Garhi Kanoura in Lucknow, owner Shashi Gupta lavished praise upon Mr. Modi, calling him ‘nek’ (good), ‘saaf dil’ (clean of heart) and ‘garibon ka masiha’ (messiah of the poor). Notebandi
expectedly topped her list of achievements by Mr. Modi, but a surprise
inclusion was the 104 satellites sent up by ISRO. I tried to argue that
the achievement was the cumulative result of years of hard work and
research. But she was adamant. Mr. Modi had said he had done it, so he
had done it. Even if it was a lie or an exaggeration, it didn’t matter.

The Prime Minister might have become the butt of social media jokes
for his frequent overseas visits. But for the faithful, the travels had
raised the profile of the country and brought it ‘samman’
(honour) — again a repeat of Mr. Modi’s own words without engagement
with what these trips might have actually achieved. The country’s
prestige figured frequently in conversations, and in some places, people
simply said they liked everything about Mr. Modi. What was everything?
“Everything.”
The voices on the ground were too loud to miss. But
who could have known that a Prime Minister would use the Lok Sabha
format to steamroll all local variations and conflicts and wrest the
biggest mandate since the Janata Party wave of 1977? That this happened
breaking past trends is a warning sign for more than one reason. The
faith Mr. Modi’s voters have placed in him would frighten anyone not as
supremely self-confident as he is. Surrender on this scale can be both
empowering and disempowering. It can nudge Mr. Modi, via the Chief
Minister he appoints, towards speedy delivery of promises. But equally,
any failure can breach the trust to devastating effect.
A more
worrying aspect, brushed over in the exclamations caused by the size of
the verdict, is the communal grooming of the polity. Travelling in west
U.P., I found perfectly sane discussions turn into hate talk and
Muslim-bashing. At mid-point, Mr. Modi brought in references to kabristan and shamshan
and his party chief, Amit Shah, denounced his opponents as “Kasab”, all
of which became licence to shame communities, and in language
unprintably coarse in some places. The Akhilesh Yadav government’s
perceived partisanship towards Muslims and Yadavs was already an issue
with voters who seized on the words of encouragement from Mr. Modi to
openly air their prejudices.
A group of schoolboys on the road
from Allahabad to Varanasi said temples in their villages had been razed
to build grand new mosques. A quick check revealed this to be a
dangerous exaggeration. At a wayside teashop in Sursanda village in
Barabanki district, Rajesh Yadav said he had voted the SP but mentioned
Ram mandir as a top priority. “We are Hindustan, not Kabristan or
Pakistan.”
At the Allahabad High Court where I met 30-odd lawyers,
there was near consensus on voting Mr. Modi. But almost immediately,
the conversation degenerated into xenophobic excoriation of Muslims. A
woman lawyer associated with the SP said that while she did not care for
Mr. Modi, she liked him for not having fielded any Muslim on the 403
Assembly seats.
When the winning party consciously excludes
Muslims from its calculations, what message does that send? When voters
approvingly quote that decision as the reason for Mr. Modi’s impending
victory, what does it portend for India’s future? As Mr. Modi celebrates
his victory, he should also reflect on the true essence of the BJP’s
election slogan, sabka saath sabka vikas.

Map of L K Advani's Rath Yatra of 1990

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